Hard truths about ballet in Southland

If a reigning star at American Ballet Theatre -- recently (if unofficially) crowned one of the kings of dance -- can’t inspire enough support to launch even a midsize ballet company in Southern California, who can?

The question lingers after Thursday’s resignation of Ballet Pacifica artistic director Ethan Stiefel, a spectacular dancer who has appeared on millennial stages, movie screens and televisions -- and someone with exciting plans for the Irvine-based institution when he signed up only 15 months ago.

Stiefel’s resignation came on the heels of the Pacifica board’s announcement that his whole first season would have to be scrapped because of major funding shortfalls, even though auditions for the company had taken place just a few weeks earlier.

In his brief tenure, Stiefel hadn’t relied solely on the board’s fundraising acumen: During the intermissions of other dancers’ performances, you could see him chatting up well-heeled ballet matrons, and if he ever felt like Groucho Marx wooing Margaret Dumont, he never let on.

He also won hearts (and respect) by becoming perhaps the only artistic director in Anglo American ballet not to commission a world premiere from Christopher Wheeldon (emerging as the Wal-Mart of choreography), as well as resisting, or at least leaving unspoken, any burning ambitions to choreograph himself.

A good guy this Ethan Stiefel, and also smart enough not to quit his day job at ABT. Too bad he had to learn the hard way what the rest of us have understood for a long time: Everybody wants a resident world-class ballet company in the Southland, but nobody wants to pay for it.

The specific problems that defeated the attempts by Stiefel and his predecessors to establish big ballet in our landscape have often been detailed in these pages.

And rather than repeating them and clucking sadly yet again, how about considering a radical proposal? How about forbidding anyone to start yet another new local penniless ballet company until we’ve doubled our dance audience through a host of development strategies?

Let’s use whatever capital the dance community can generate to subsidize free tickets for every teenager; to get dance each week on KCET-TV (perhaps something modeled on the “Eye on Dance” series that ran on two PBS stations in New York); to open a dance space where local artists can afford to present themselves; to offer every kind of in-school program, including ballet classes.

After the audience dramatically expands -- supporting four nights for a UCLA Live dance event, not two; two weeks for the Kirov Ballet at the Pavilion, not one -- then and only then can we start dreaming again of homegrown swan queens and high-flying L.A. princes. And once we’re living in a larger and presumably more vital dance scene, just maybe we’ll marshal the energy and resources to make those dreams a reality.

In the meantime, don’t waste your sympathy on Stiefel. Yeah, we’ll miss him. But if you’ve seen him dance, you know it’s true: Whatever risks he takes, he always lands on his feet.

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Segal is The Times’ dance critic. Contact him at lewis.segal@latimes.com.